This will be my last entry of 2016.  Next year will begin, barring some unexpected act of fate, with the ascension to the presidency of Donald Trump, as dim-witted, incurious, crass, and crooked human being that has ever held public office in America.  Trump has spent the hours since the election staffing his White House with the greatest ( Read more... )

2016, the little year that absolutely could not, is almost over, and with the exception of people for whom it was a raging success - morticians and neo-Nazis, in the main - most of us are eager to see the end of it.  Starting out, as all years do, with the unlimited promise of the new and the possibility of growth, transformation and, yes, perhaps ( Read more... )

Shalom Auslander got the best possible start on having a sickly fatalistic sense of humor:  he was a miserable Jew from the day he was born.

As detailed in his highly entertaining 2007 memoir Foreskin’s Lament, Auslander was raised a deeply unhappy Orthodox Jew in and around New York in the ’70s and ’80s.  Like many of that ancient faith’s most ( Read more... )

Six months ago, if you had a grown adult wearing a t-shirt with a children’s character crash into you in a public place because they had their face buried in a cell phone screen and weren’t’ paying attention to their surroundings, odds were pretty good they were just using Duolingo to practice a language of no practical value, like Esperanto or ( Read more... )

Today is the Fourth of July, America’s national holiday.  Longtime readers of this site will know that every day on this year, I post a little sermon about the state of the country, always trying to follow the advice of the late, great Paul Fussell, who wrote, in BAD, or, the Dumbing of America:  “There is one day of the year when America should ( Read more... )

It’s baseball season, and that, friends, is the best of all seasons.

Baseball writers, who, given their love of a game that has historical weight over all other American sports, tend to be a poetic and sentimental lot, even more obnoxious than people who mark out over other sports.  They’re not quite as obnoxious as football writers, but they make ( Read more... )

Much as the leads of Netflix’s series Love have mixed feelings upon meeting - it’s really not so much what you would call a ‘meet cute’ as a ‘meet indifferent and slightly hostile’ - I had mixed feelings about the series itself.  This was largely due to its pedigree.  Love‘s creators are Judd Apatow, Paul Rust, and Lesley Arfin; the former has done ( Read more... )

Movies of ideas are so rare these days that you have to go out of your way to find them, and that can mean overcoming your own prejudices.  Mainstream films with ideas are rarer still, so I had to put my bias against CGI-loaded sci-fi blockbusters when I read about Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina.  It’s a movie that posits itself ( Read more... )

When you have dedicated your life to becoming a professional, it isn’t that hard to pick up an old skill, no matter how long it’s been since you exercised it.  Much has been made of George Miller’s advancing age (he’s almost twice as old as a typical action film director, and probably four times as a typical action film viewer), and of the fact ( Read more... )

I.

So he says to me “Take it to the limit one more time.”  And I’m, like, one more time?  How many fucking times am I going to have to take it to the limit?  I mean, if this is the last time, fine, I’ll take it to the limit.  But I didn’t hire on at this job to just take it to the limit every time you decide you want it taken to the limit.  There ( Read more... )